This invention regards a control device for the opening and closing of the metal bar sliding guides in a multiple-spindle lathe feeding equipment.
It is known that metal bars are fed to a multiple-spindle lathe through an appropriate equipment basically consisting of a turning drum, on which sliding guides, are angularly placed at the same distance, inside which the bars are fed through appropriate bar-pushers to the different spindles of the lathe in order to allow the accomplishment of the various machining operations required.
The aforesaid sliding guides can be opened so as to permit the insertion of a metal bar into each of them at the beginning of each working cycle. The bars are inserted transversally as against the sliding guide, which has therefore to be completely opened longitudinally in order to allow the bar to be inserted.
To solve the question concerning the opening and the following closing of the sliding guides in an equipment like that, a lot of technical solutions have been worked out that permit to reach the aim on one side, but on the other side turn out to be extremely complicated as for their construction and maintenance. Furthermore they are very expensive and shall be operated by particularly skilled personnel, owing to their complicated construction.
Moreover metal bar feeding devices imply that the longitudinal axes of the sliding guides are kept perfectly parallel to one another during operation to prevent any seizure particularly while the bars are being inserted into the guides.
In traditional machines the supports of the sliding guides do not permit to assure the aforesaid parallelism and it often leads to a non-precise introduction of the bars into the guides.